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A rural road in Jiangsu province disappeared overnight after a thief hit on a concrete way to make cash. Photo: Chinanews.com

Now you see it ... Chinese road vanishes overnight as thief digs up some fast cash

An 800-metre stretch of road vanished overnight in eastern China late last month as an enterprising thief found a concrete way to come up with some quick cash.

Residents of a village in Suqian, Jiangsu province, were puzzled to find one morning that the 3.5-metre wide road had gone and just the rocky base course remained, China News Service reported on Sunday.

Police were called and a witness told officers that he had seen a villager identified only as Zhu driving a rubbish truck near the site at the time, the report said.

Police said Zhu told them that he was unemployed and had been thinking about ways to make money when he came up with a “clever” idea.

“The road hasn’t been used much lately so I thought why not dig it up and sell the material,” he was quoted as saying.

Zhu hired a digging machine and several trucks to break up the road overnight, selling the 500 tonnes of concrete rubble to a building works business for 10 yuan (US$1.60) per tonne.

Zhu was charged with theft and the case was still under investigation, the report said.

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